by Paul Gibb
Which of our Fellowship members has a PhD in biochemistry and did a postdoc in immunology – and is now studying to become a Pilates instructor? And has done lots of volunteer work for us here at the ‘Ship?
If you guessed Gwen Murphy (and would have done so even if you hadn’t seen her name at the head of this spotlight piece), you are quite right!
Here is her story:
Gwen was born in the western suburbs of Chicago and moved to Chicago when she was two years old. Her parents still live in the same house she grew up in, an unassuming brick bungalow a mile east of Midway airport on the city’s South side.
She described her father as a “recovering Irish Catholic and Lithuanian.” He attended college for two years, then left and worked his entire career at the Lab for Astrophysics and Space Research at the University of Chicago.
Gwen’s mother, she says, was a “PK” (preacher’s kid) who grew up in a suburb of Chicago where her father (Gwen’s grandfather), who was raised a German Mennonite, was a UCC pastor. She and her two daughters, Gwen and her younger sister, attended various Protestant churches around the South Side of Chicago.
Gwen describes herself as having been a “quiet, imaginative, sensitive, and precocious” child. While attending the University of Illinois Urbana as a chemistry major, she took three semesters of German classes so that she could spend her junior year at an exchange program at the University of Vienna in Austria. To her surprise, “most people there spoke English and so it would have been just as easy to be there if I had not studied German.” But she did take differential equations and physical chemistry classes in German and became relatively fluent in the language.
What brought Gwen to the Boulder area? She moved here in 1997 in order to get a PhD in biochemistry at the University of Colorado, which she received in 2003. That was where she met her husband Ricardo Stephen, a Canadian transplant who also was getting a PhD in biochemistry at CU. She did a postdoc in an immunology lab at National Jewish Health, after which she pivoted from benchwork to the field of medical writing for a small biopharm company in the Denver area, where she worked until 2014.
Her first child, Evangeline, was born in 2007. Gwen returned to full-time work when Evie was only six weeks old. Gwen loved motherhood and she experienced the return to work as a rude awakening to the challenges of maternity leave policy in the US at the time. When she later had the twins Blaise and Emmeline (‘Emme’), she had a difficult pregnancy and was on strict bedrest for almost 4 months prior to giving birth, but then had the good fortune to be able to quit her job and stay home with her kids for three and a half years, a liberating and soul-inspiring time during which she found Buddhism, UUism, and Pilates, the three loves of her second half of life. She eventually returned to the biopharm industry as a freelance medical writer and consultant from 2016 to the present, opening her first small business, Murphy Medical Writing.
Gwen’s husband Ricardo got his PhD in biochemistry a little after Gwen did. When Evie was six weeks old, Rico had to defend his PhD and thus did not have a job right away, which was one of the reasons Gwen felt she needed to work full-time during that period. Ricardo then got a job teaching at Metro State and is now a faculty member at CU Boulder in the biochemistry department.
How did Gwen find BVUUF? While on her “extended maternity leave” with the twins, she became very interested in Buddhism and started a daily meditation practice, which she considered an “absolute must” for being able to be present when her kids were little. But “Buddhists don’t offer child care,” she quips, so she Googled “Unitarian” and found our Fellowship, which she started attending in 2014. She combines Buddhism, UUism, and Pilates “for lifelong spirituality enrichment,” as she puts it. She had major neck problems in 2018, which were exacerbated by the physical stress of computer work and the emotional stress of the pandemic. As she puts it, “I started losing feeling in my hands and feet, but those problems are now mostly gone due to Pilates and not sitting at a desk all day.” Currently training to be a Pilates teacher, she is still at BVUUF “because we are a community of seekers, and when I lose my North Star I can come to the ‘Ship and you all help me remember.” She is also deeply grateful for the education she’s received on the neurodiversity movement and on LGBTQIA+ issues, both issues that are deeply personal as she seeks to better support the growth of neurodiverse and queer members of her family.
Gwen has been busy at the Fellowship. She co-facilitated a meditation group, served on the hiring committee for the School of the Spirit interim director and youth coordinator, and was a member of the memoir group, the Racial Justice Task Force, and the COVID Task Force. She has been the registrar for the School of the Spirit summer camp annually since joining the ‘ship, she’s a School of the Spirit volunteer, and this year she is a new member of the Committee on Shared Ministries, where she acts as liaison to the Lifespan Faith Formation Council and the Member Engagement Council.
She is a positive, energetic person, a consummate seeker and questioner whom all of us can admire. We are so lucky to have her among us.
Published September 12, 2023
